


Cleared Viewing

by BlackEyedGirl



Category: The Avengers (2012), The West Wing
Genre: Crossover, M/M, Revelations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-04
Updated: 2013-04-04
Packaged: 2017-12-07 11:56:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/748249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackEyedGirl/pseuds/BlackEyedGirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam doesn't believe in being casual with the truth, which occasionally makes his new job a little difficult. Phil doesn't lie but he sometimes delays. [Written for Porn Battle Amnesty for prompts 'confidentiality, truth'.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cleared Viewing

**Author's Note:**

> Major spoilers for The Avengers, no major spoilers for The West Wing. References past Sam het and slash.
> 
> This is an alternate take of a scene I haven't written yet in a fic I haven't written enough of, in the verse where 'Agent Casper' runs into Sam at the time when SHIELD is busy rebuilding and needs a strategy for dealing with the public fallout, Darcy and Sam ~~have shenanigans~~ make their own job descriptions, Sam threatens the occasional Appropriations Committee, and falls for the guy who is all about duty.

Sam, once upon a time, had about as low a clearance level as a person could have while still being allowed input in meetings with the President of the United States. He did not know military secrets. He’s not completely sure he knows any now, except in so far as that Phil may constitute one all on his own.

Phil’s eyes are patient when his words are not. “Mr Seaborn, I’m really going to need you to dig in for me here.”

“Could you please, I don’t know, give me a minute while I assimilate this into my worldview?”

“Your worldview already included aliens and Gods, occasionally as one and the same, so I’m not entirely sure how-.”

Sam, in truth, had experienced more problems with the Gods than the aliens, but he has learned to cope. He has also learned to deal with the fact that a man he had trusted to protect the country had been doing so under an assumed name, at the behest of an organisation which at the time didn’t officially exist according to any of the files Sam was allowed to read. There are still huge portions of the work, of Phil, which are hastily erased, black with the censor’s bar.

Phil makes a roll of his tie, slipping it into his jacket pocket. He hangs the jacket over the side of the couch, and looks back at Sam. “Getting there?” 

“Were you waiting to tell me this because I didn’t have the clearance, or because you thought it would...?” They’ve talked before today. Phil’s offices in SHIELD are three floors above Sam’s but Phil still finds the time to come and tell Sam to stop sending memos accusing their own organisation of unconstitutional behaviour, or that their departmental budget does not stretch to hiring Darcy an assistant. He also, sometimes, stands in Sam’s doorway to talk political fallout, halfway to leaving again but not going. He hadn’t mentioned this.

“It’s not a secret,” Phil says, with a shrug of one shoulder.

“You were dead, and it wasn’t a secret.”

“There were a lot of people around at the time - we couldn’t exactly keep it under wraps. Honestly, the Director didn’t even try very hard.”

Sam has spent most of his adult life surrounded by people who abuse sarcasm shamelessly, but Phil still trips him up. “So you’re telling me now because...”

“Because I had a strong suspicion, Mr Seaborn, that you were about to take my shirt off.”

Sam doesn’t take the shirt off, but he undoes the buttons and pulls. He is not completely sure that it had been his next planned move before Phil decided to throw resurrection on the table. Sam had loosened the knot of Phil’s tie and slid the jacket off his shoulders. He had already pushed up the sleeves of his own shirt before Phil had appeared in his office this evening. Phil had frowned and straightened the knot in Sam’s tie before glaring at it until Sam took it off, a lost cause. They had both been working too long already. Sam is the kind of tired-focussed he used to get on the night before State of the Union addresses. Now it is about today’s operation in Cleveland, followed by the Senate address, followed by Phil wanting five minutes of his time that turned to thirty. So Sam might have gone for the top button of Phil’s shirt, but he might equally well have gone straight for the buckle of Phil’s belt. It has been a long day. There is a small, pale scar in the centre of Phil’s chest. When Sam pushes at his shoulder, he can see the messier, larger match along Phil’s spine. Sam has never been able to stand people who would stab you in the back.

Phil doesn’t move.

“This is what killed you,” Sam says.

“Temporarily,” Phil acknowledges.

“And you kept doing this anyway.”

‘This’ stretches from recruiting Sam for a job that Director Fury hadn’t approved in a department he didn’t approve _of_ , past heading up the strangest field office Sam has ever seen, right through to occasionally talking members of the Avengers into playing nicely together. And sometime between Sam knowing him as Special Agent Casper of the FBI and meeting him again as Agent Coulson, it had got him killed. Phil raises one eyebrow. “I had a job to do.”

Sam presses Phil back into the chair. 

Phil laughs, a breath in a caught moment before Sam is kissing his neck. “I gotta say, I really hope the death thing isn’t what does it for you.”

“No.”

“Okay then.”

Sam doesn’t have a type. Sam has fallen in love, in no particular order, with sharp-tongued blondes, bearded writers and argumentative redheads, a few people whose hearts he has broken and more than a few who have broken his. Sam falls in love with words, with anyone who has ever looked at him and said something beautiful and unexpected. With people who make him laugh. But a lot of the time he falls in love with the people who will never love him more than the work they do, because they shouldn’t. Because the work is the most important thing in the world, because it’s changing the world. Because the work might kill them one day but they will go down fighting, shoulder to shoulder with their brothers and sisters. Sam had forgotten that, for a little while, until the newly-minted Phil made him a job offer. Now he is exhausted to his bones and sometimes doesn’t sleep for hints of knowledge of things that nearly happened, but this is the good fight and they are right in the middle of it. Neither of them are done yet.

Phil has other scars, scattered over his shoulders and upper body. Sam keeps his tone conversational. “Remember when you told me you were mostly on desk duty?”

“I am.” Another careful blank. “That wasn’t always the case.”

Sam has put together a few things about the military history, the respect that even Fury has for his senior operative. There are still large parts Sam hasn’t an idea about yet, and might never. Phil died, and he came back to work anyway. He has Sam drafting recommendations for contingency plans for what to do in a world after the skies open up. He spends three hours every Friday listening to people explaining why everything they ever thought about the universe was wrong, and deciding what to do next. These things aren’t all happy, but they are true.

Sam’s laptop, forgotten too long, makes a noise as it goes to hibernate. Sam looks at it, momentarily distracted. “I was waiting on numbers from the claims after the thing in Cleveland.”

“It’ll be tomorrow,” Phil says. “These people... let’s just say they like to double-check.”

Sam blinks. “Why did you come down to my office to begin with? I didn’t ask.” They had got distracted.

Phil says, “To tell you that it was one a.m. and you should go home. And that the numbers would be in tomorrow.”

“Yeah?”

“Also although this was, among other things, not something I specifically came in here to tell you: your office door locks.”

Sam absorbs this information. He gets off the couch and locks the door. When he turns around, Phil is rolling his neck back, shirt still undone. His hands drop open on the couch, either side of his thighs. There are still blanks, but this code is not indecipherable. Sam assimilates this into his view of the truth of the world, and walks back across the room.


End file.
